Something I keep thinking about is how we’re seeing the end of what I call the “tech zeitgeist”.
Started upon realizing that we‘ve likely seen the end of the social network era. No new social networking startups have popped-off in a while, and the recent ones are arguably more about connecting you to entertainers than friends.
Besides that, a lot of the tech ideas from 2012-2020 have kind of fizzled out. 3D printing will likely never enter the mainstream. VR/AR has failed to launch. In broad strokes, everything has either reached maturity or faded away.
AI is the one exception it seems, and when you realize that you start to realize that all the hype and money being poured into AI may be more out of desperation than anything else. It’s AI or nothing it seems.
And then, you have Apple at what is arguably its most vulnerable, while many other tech giants go through some kind of enshittification phase.
My non-technical neighbors have 3D printers, so I think it is definitely heading mainstream. Maybe not for the older generation, but definitely for young people. And outfits like Bambu Labs are pushing it even farther that way. Automatic everything, pick models from your phone, just insert the filament into a hole and you're done. The real obstacle is the difficulty making your own models, but many people go quite a while before hitting that limit; you can get models for a lot of common everyday things without having to design it yourself.
The online tech space is reaching maturity. It went from nothing in the 90s to the global scale industry we have today. The winners have been chosen and the reality is infinite growth does not exist, infinite ideas do not exist.
But for 2 decades it seemed like tech was the be it all path for infinite growth. VCs pumped in hundreds of billions of dollars into the industry. Marketing painted everything as the next big thing as the money flowed and you had 3000 clone startups for every potential SaaS.
The money tap has run out (interest rates being one factor, but cracks were showing even before this), the bills are coming due. The industry is consolidating.
AI however is the last big hurrah for the industry. Investors and companies see it potentially as a big new exlosive growth space.
Yes, the entire stock market right now in the US is being held up by all the AI sentiment. Though it's starting to deflate.
It was bound to happen. Think about it. What was the last big application on the Desktop? Chrome in 2008 is probably the last.
The last really big advance in apps? Big new social media as you said? New communication paradigm.
Heck Smart watches where the real last big technology device and. Their sales while yes in the hundreds of millions are a shadow compared with things like smart phones.
I think we are seeing the entire industry calcifying around us. And a lot of folks know this. Thus the rush from a subset of folks that are trying to get in on the ground floor of anything tech like that they can possible pump and dump their way to riches. Crypto, NFS, AI over hype, VR, AR, Web 3 etc.
Soon we may have to accept that we are going form the fun fresh upstart stage to mature stable and boring faze. The entire tech industry will be IBM.
“AI is only successful because these other unrelated tech super cycles are failing (they’re not)” is an insane argument. No one researches AI because 3D printing failed. Meta doesn’t buy H100s as a last resort. It’s a huge opportunity and the start of a an enormous super cycle that offers new services to customers and improves existing platforms.
> No one researches AI because 3D printing failed.
Yes you do. Maybe not specifically, but: AI research only happens because companies and capital firms have invested billions of dollars into paying the salaries of people who do the research. AI is the latest category in a string of categories which have dominated the zeitgeist, to varying degrees of success; crypto was definitely the most recent prior, and AI definitely seems to be doing better than that.
AI is only successful because there exists billions of dollars in undeployed capital looking for returns. That's reality; and it states something similar enough to "AI is only successful because the other super-cycles failed" that the statement gets a pass; if crypto still offered strong ROI, there would be a lot less capital available for AI, and AI is extremely capital intensive.
> 3D printing will likely never enter the mainstream.
I'm going to argue that it still might. I've been at it for about 5 years now and when I started printing my local Micro Center didn't carry anything related to 3D printers. Then they picked up the Ender 3 a few years back as the one printer they offered and they had a dozen basic color options of filament on the end of one side of an isle. Today that same store stocks at least 6 different printers on display and there's one and a half isles of a variety of filament options and another half isle of parts. And while Micro Center employees are usually more technically inclined than other retail employees, they themselves seemed to have gone from wondering what this odd Maker enthusiast carried up to the register to initiating conversations about your selections and comparing them to their own purchases. They wouldn't dedicate the floor space, let alone expand it continually and invest in larger and more expensive inventory if it wasn't selling at an increased rate. It's still a niche maker/techie hobby of course, but it's expanding more rapidly now than ever before.
I'm not sure that it will ever go 'mainstream' but it looks like it will have a vibrant and stable future ahead. It is taking the slow boring but reliable path upwards. Better than crashing and burning.
It sure feels like 3D printing especially "desktop" has trouble improving recently, and is nowhere near democratized like classic printer, and its not entirely a hardware problem.
Part of the trouble with 3D printing is that its utility is limited if you don’t know how to design, and not everyone wants to learn.
If you have no CAD/modeling experience, making something custom is limited to the simple variation available in the software, or you just buy off the shelf models. 3D printing skeptics said that 3D printers were just for making worthless junk.
There’s an opportunity coming with an LLM-style text-to-model generator. I saw one recently and it is pretty exciting.
Agree. For me personally, 3d printing has been a "hit" and the printers keep getting better, cheaper and more reliable. Good bed levelling, multi-head, failure detection etc are reaching the mainstream and the printers I have now are amazingly better than what I started with.
But most people (reasonably) don't seem that interested in making small plastic things. It's a niche thing to want to do and as you point out, there's a learning curve. Plus materials and process limitations mean that a printed item will generally be inferior to a bought one unless you designed it yourself to meet your exact use-case.
I think, at least, Apple has taken multiple losses over the past year which should concern long-time fans of the company. Vision Pro had very low expectations, and failed to even meet those, now almost forgotten by even some people who own one. They invested billions into developing a car, which never materialized and has now been shut down. They're pretty far behind in AI? Like, we'll see how far behind (or not) come WWDC I suspect, but the CEO of the Browser Company is throwing fighting words like "the situation is ten times worse than you think" [1]. And AI is damn bubbly anyway; it may be the case that investments there don't pay off.
I'm not sure I entirely agree that we're coming to the end of the tech zeitgeist; tech still absolutely runs the markets and world. But I do believe a part of that, at least, is happening: Apple is losing control of the marketing narrative for consumer tech. And, its not obvious that anyone is well positioned right now to pick up their mantle. The next decade is going to be super exciting; I suspect we'll continue to see lots of experimentation, devices like the Humane pin and R1, lots of failures, hopefully some successes, as companies narrow in on what's next.
I find this a strange perspective. There are many tech ideas which have barely even started. Quantum computing, space travel, DNA modification, climate control, to name a few. These will all affect a lot of humans in the future, unless we mess something up.
Or perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment, and you focus more on the media and communication part of tech?
More on localized tech that we use directly day to day. All the things you mentioned are big scale things that need large economic inputs, some larger than entire small nations to get off the ground. While they can impact us, they are things that are much more nebulous and vague to experience.
I'm guessing GP means the other Big Tech companies have some kind of rent-seeking operation because they already have a tight grasp of some big moat. Eg. Google has Search that isn't going anywhere soon; Meta owns pretty much all the social media platforms that are making money; Microsoft has inserted itself everywhere; etc...
And the "only" thing that Apple has is just happy users, who aren't as bound to having to buy or use Apple products and could in theory switch whenever they wanted. It's much easier to give up using Apple products than say wean on Google products.
The last thing we need is another race to the bottom. Android gets new features to be competitive, if they dominate by basically giving away their product it'll be the end of any innovation. And we have ample evidence that Google is not even slightly more altruistic than Apple.
How is opening up the Apple ecosystem a race to the bottom? Aren't they going to continue to produce their amazing products and apps? Are you implying that if they do open it up, they won't be as dominant?
I don't understand how "opening up a walled garden" would ever result in a worse product. If anything, they'll have to compete and become even better.
3D printing has plenty of usage. I don’t think the “mainstream” has any need for it (atleast until the point where the printers can print multi material slices to print out entire products) but the people that use it are still a sizable segment.
Started upon realizing that we‘ve likely seen the end of the social network era. No new social networking startups have popped-off in a while, and the recent ones are arguably more about connecting you to entertainers than friends.
Besides that, a lot of the tech ideas from 2012-2020 have kind of fizzled out. 3D printing will likely never enter the mainstream. VR/AR has failed to launch. In broad strokes, everything has either reached maturity or faded away.
AI is the one exception it seems, and when you realize that you start to realize that all the hype and money being poured into AI may be more out of desperation than anything else. It’s AI or nothing it seems.
And then, you have Apple at what is arguably its most vulnerable, while many other tech giants go through some kind of enshittification phase.
Can’t wait for the end personally.